Review: Star Trek: Infinite rewards role-playing and replaying

Star Trek games and strategy seem to fit together like a spandex, tight-fitting spacesuit. While, in the past, game studios have attempted to apply the Star Trek brand to sexier game genres like first-person shooters or flight combat simulators, this often felt like a sweaty attempt to make Trek fit into a non-fan’s definition of “cool.” Thankfully, Trek’s fortunes seem to be changing, as for the second time this year, it’s been applied to a game that both fits the brand and can stand up next to other titles in its genre. Nimble Giant Entertainment is the developer of this 2016 Game of The Year winner. Masters of OrionParadox Interactive, a division of Paradox (£$££££££££££££££££££££££££££££££Crusader Kings, Stellaris), Star Trek: Infinite is a 4X grand strategy game that shares a lot of qualities with a good Star Trek episode: It’s cerebral, accessible, occasionally a little clumsy, and overall a good time.

Star Trek: InfiniteThe Alpha and Beta Quadrants are where many Star Trek tales take place. The game allows you to control one of the four main factions of Star Trek and compete with the others in an attempt to dominate the universe. The object of the game is to expand your empire and to absorb as many of the region’s smaller civilizations as possible over the course of three centuries, but each faction goes about this in their own unique mode. United Federation of Planets, a benevolent Federation of Planets that shares the bounties of its economy after a period of scarcity with others, is able to make friends. In order to establish puppet states the enigmatic Romulan Imperial uses political and spying tricks, but the Klingon empire prefers a more direct method, destroying its enemies with a fierce storm of battle. Cardassian Union occupies, enslaves, and exploits their neighbors to benefit its poor homeworld. Each faction is faced with a number of challenges, including exploring the last frontier, managing and acquiring resources and maintaining the massive galactic governments.

Image: Paradox Interactive

Veteran 4X Grand Strategy players (particularly Stellaris, this game’s direct ancestor) will be at home playing InfiniteStarships can be sent across the 2D maps to explore new star systems, and then colonize any habitable planets. The key to victory is expanding your empire slowly and steadily without losing ground. Players are guided through the process by a faction-specific mission tree that encourages you to play to your empire’s strengths. The Federation’s biggest advantage is that its ability to provide nearly infinite creature comforts means rarely worrying about internal stability, so you can feel free to start exploring strange new worlds right away. Cardassian missions give you the option to build forced labor camp to fulfill your needs, but they also suggest that you begin building reeducation center to maintain loyalty among the population. The mission tree rewards you with bonuses for completing challenges. This will help you stay competitive while the three other major powers carve their corners on the map.

That’s not to say that Star Trek: InfiniteKeeps the player on track. Role-playing your faction to match their modus operandi from the TV shows will get you reliable results, but there’s nothing to stop you from veering from the canon. You can choose to follow a divergent mission path, for example, you could speed up the peaceful unification of Romulan-Vulcans, or you might let the Federation devolve into an fascist state. But you are also free to ignore these paths and create your own story. Each faction has unique traits and capabilities that make it impossible to perfectly imitate the play style of another, but there’s plenty of wiggle room if you feel like creating new obstacles for yourself on repeat playthroughs. However, the canonical route offers the easiest and fastest way to win.

As I’m sure most players do, I started my journey with the Federation Campaign, because it has the best faction-specific perks, and the easiest difficulty curve. The Federation benefits from beginning with four stable founding worlds and a plentiful supply of Energy, which is the game’s primary currency. Multiple minor powers are willing to accept your Federation, and will grant you additional worlds as well as starfleets. The challenge for the Federation is to bolster your military fleet proportional to the size of your territory, at least until you can amass so much wealth that your opponents can’t hope to overpower you. On the default difficulty of “Ensign,” I became too big to fail centuries ahead of schedule, but even on “Commodore,” the fourth of six difficulty levels against AI opponents, I was able to eke out a win long before the start of the official endgame.

Image: Paradox Interactive

Three playable aliens empires each have a unique challenge, which is in line with their canonical placement. Klingons cannot expand by any other means than force. But their warships cost little and every time they lose one, the Empire gains a culture benefit. The Romulan campaign has an extra crisis to manage, as their home star system will be destroyed by a supernova a quarter of the way through the game, but they have the ability to seduce minor powers into becoming puppet states that feed them resources until they’re ready to be fully assimilated. Cardassia’s homeworld is in deficit. However, they have a minor power occupied (Bajor) at the start of the game, and can work non Cardassian laborers to death for maximum resource production. Players receive annual death reports from their labour camps. You may need some time to get used to how these empires take advantage of their power (did I forget to mention the annual mortality reports?) But they do differentiate gameplay.

The campaign is a series of crisis, anomalies and dilemmas that players face. These are presented as two to three paragraph story cards, with a range of choices for moving the story along. The stories in the game are based directly on some episodes from Next GenerationWhile others are unique to the game. They’re all written in a prose style that’s more flippant than you might expect from Trek, though in line with the flavor text of StellarisYou can also play a strategy board game. What’s impressive about the setup of these story scenarios is how, despite their costs and rewards being the same across campaigns, I found that the material needs of whatever empire I was playing nearly always guided me towards making the kinds of choices that my faction would likely make on the show. As the Federation it was easy to choose the diplomatic or humane option, but not always affordable for the Klingons. It feels appropriate to Trek’s ethos that the galaxy’s more brutal powers make some dubious or cruel choices, not because they’re “evil,” but because that’s where their circumstances lead them. It is still possible to disrupt that, but requires a great deal more effort.

The game’s most underwhelming gameplay element is the Borg, which is included as a non-player faction that intermittently invades your space. The Borg is positioned as the game’s foremost ongoing threat, regardless of which faction you play, but on default settings, it’s little more than a nuisance. It’s a good thing they have their very own difficulty slider in the game settings. Nausicaan’s pirates pose a greater threat, as they attack with more frequency and force. However, their story is not affected.

Image: Paradox Interactive via Polygon

InfiniteThe UI is also a bit frustrating, and gets worse as you progress through the game. While it’s easy to move the camera directly to the location of any planet or starship you control, the same is not true for mission locations, which might even be in places you’ve yet to explore. The game’s search function will take you to any star system, but not every mission description specifies where it takes place, requiring that you scroll around an ever-expanding galactic map looking for a yellow pulsing indicator. The designers have also clearly made a remarkable effort to bring authentic Trek flavor to the game (even including a full Klingon language audio track in the Deluxe Edition), but that means it’s all the more jarring whenever I come across terminology that has been held over from StellarisFrom which InfiniteAt the beginning of development, there were branches. (Never have the terms “voidcraft” or “highway node” been used in the Trek canon, though franchise-specific equivalents do exist.)

The criticisms here are mostly minor. As with any 4X game, what’s most fun about Star Trek: InfiniteThe challenge is to see how many plates can you keep spinning. A century into the game’s timeline (or a few hours in real time), you’ll be managing the population and production of a dozen colony worlds, sprawling civilian and military starfleets, ground forces, a spy network, three streams of research projects, and your relationships with multiple friendly and hostile factions. You can automate some of the pursuits, so you can focus your attention on those you enjoy. The ability to control the passage of time means that you can get as granular as you want, to micromanage to your heart’s content, or to go full speed ahead and put out fires as they erupt. Star Trek: Infinite’s flexibility accounts for a lot of its replay appeal — as does the presumption that, as a Paradox game, official expansions and polished community mods are surely forthcoming. After all, there is still a half-galaxy to discover.

Star Trek: InfiniteReleased on October 12th for Macs and Windows PCs. Paradox Interactive supplied a PC download code to review the game. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.